The very best of Holmes

Extraordinary at this stage of one's life to be rushing back from the coast on Saturday evening so as not to miss even the opening credits of Doctor Who. Not only because Russell T Davies's reinvention with Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper is such an exhilarating (if sometimes baffling) ride, but because, while it lasts, Doctor Who is once again one of the rituals which make Saturday Saturday, co-equal with James Alexander Gordon telling you just after 5pm through the winter how Tranmere Rovers and St Mirren got on. That is why the alternatives to watching at 7pm on Saturday - the video, or the Sunday repeat on BBC3 - cannot be an adequate substitute. And in any case, Sunday at 7pm is the time for another weekend TV treat: the re-running on ITV3 of the programmes made by Granada between 1984 and 1994 with Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes.

Watching them now resurrects the question so often asked at the time: has there ever been a better Sherlock than Brett? Even those who had previously sworn by Basil Radford or Arthur Wontner began to waver. There are times when the mannerisms - the flare of the nostrils, the sudden electric smile which flashes on and off in a second, even faster than Gordon Brown's - begin to grate; yet the range of moods and emotions, from impish exuberance and the sudden urgent insistence on leaving for Euston station this minute, if not before, right through to the speechless glooms which seem sometimes to be part of a necessary ordeal which finally furnishes inspiration - all these seem to me to accord very well with the Holmes that Conan Doyle imagined. Brett's Holmes is not, as he himself used to insist, definitive; the only definitive Holmes is the one on the page. But he worked very hard to make his Holmes authentic, studying the Sidney Paget drawings in the Strand Magazine as assiduously as one of his now largely forgotten predecessors, Eille Norwood, had done, and it shows.

And there cannot, I think, have been a better Watson than Edward Hardwicke, who succeeded David Burke as series succeeded series. Burke was an excellent Watson, but Hardwicke's Watson, older, more seasoned, more satisfyingly turn-of-the-century, got the balance precisely right. The trouble with the old Basil Rathbone films is Nigel Bruce's Watson, who his scriptwriters and directors turn into a buffoon. Watson can be maddening, certainly: Holmes often has to rebuke him for his failure to pick up that which ought to be obvious. Yet he is also, in the tribute the great detective pays him at the end of their long association, in His Last Bow, "the one fixed point in a changing age". All the best detective stories are about the interplay of the characters just as much as who dun it: that was the secret of Morse. In last Sunday's instalment, The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax, Watson's solicitude, rising to near-alarm, at the depth of Holmes's humiliation and depression as he senses impending failure was a perfect instance of Hardwicke's faultless touch.

The final sequence of programmes was full of turmoil. Admirers of Conan Doyle, including the writer's daughter, had swung from enthusiastic approval to condemnation as the scripts more and more embroidered and expanded the great man's work. Budgets were tight after previous over-spending. Brett, who had suffered for most of his life from severe depression, was in the grip of the cardiomyopathy which killed him. Sometimes, making the last instalments, he was fighting for breath. He was known to have feared that Sherlock Holmes was taking him over, which fascinated the tabloids, who nursed other suspicions too. Reporters from the Sun schemed their way into hospital to confront him and ask: are you dying of Aids?

Even if Granada had not by this stage mined the archive to near exhaustion the series could not have gone on. And was he the best? To answer that you would need to have seen the rest, some of whom, as listed in Alan Barnes's excellent Sherlock Holmes on Screen, sound rather surprising. Peter Cushing as Holmes with John Mills as Watson. Christopher Plummer teamed with James Mason. Nando Gazzolo and Gianni Bonagura. And Charlton Heston as Holmes, with, as Watson, none other than Jeremy Brett. And you'd certainly need to see Eille Norwood, who the textbooks suggest was a very real embodiment of the detective too. The safest answer, a reliable each-way bet, is just to say: Brett; for extraordinarily, Norwood's real name was Brett, while Brett's real name was Huggins.